Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Diamondbacks - Acquired Rauch

Rauch, like Big Unit before him, has finally found his niche the last few years, and is now known as a good pitcher before being known as “that really tall guy.” Bowden’s flipping Rauch now, but he would still have netted a bigger return if he had flipped Chad Cordero before the season. The Diamondback bullpen is better than generally believed and it would be even better if The Large Component was a lefty, but any improvement helps in such a lousy division, a division which arguably 11 of 14 AL teams could be leading right now.

It’s encouraging for a Hall of Famer to appear on Bonifacio’s comp list, but Red Schoendienst isn’t the guy that you really want to show up there. He’s not even really a good comp as ZiPS had a lot of problems finding comps, with slapping swifties generally being low strikeout guys when they’re low walk guys. Bonifacio simply doesn’t put enough balls in play to be a usable offensive player in this day and age. He does have a great pope name, the best since Calixtus Antonine “Mike” Pagliarulo.

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Pujols had just hit .324/.383/.565 in the Midwest league, pretty good you say? What if I tell you the LEAGUE average was .250/.327/.365?

everyone got all excited when Brandon Wood at the same age hit .321/.383/.672 in the California League - but that was against a league average of .286/.357/.452 (and Wood K'd 128 times against 48 walks- Pujols had K'd just 37 times against 38 walks)

After that year BA ranked Wood #3 in all of baseball.

In fact if you neutralize their numbers to a .260/.300/.405 context you get
Pujols:.337/.387/.627
Wood: .292/.354/.602

then when you consider that low K batters translate relatively better than hi-K batters...

Pujol's ability to slug like that while having such a high contact rate should have been a bright shining flashy neon sign...

Ok I looked at everyone in 2007, over 200 PAs, and slugged 20% over league, and ranked by K/PA...
result a bunch of AAAA types way too old for their leagues